TELEVISION

Harmon just part of gang on CBS’ unstoppable ‘NCIS’

Drama begins its 11th season as TV favorite

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Last season, 18.5 million viewers tuned in weekly to see the Mark Harmon-driven drama ‘NCIS,’ but he declines to take credit. ‘I’m not the big dog,’ he says. ‘I might be a dog. But there’s a lot of dogs.’ASSOCIATED PRESSEnlarge

NEW YORK — Life comes with few chances to witness a fundamental law being turned on its head.

But last season 18.5 million viewers did just that every week, tuning to NCIS to certify it as one of TV’s highest-rated shows and, even more impressively, make it a series whose audience after 10 seasons has expanded, not shriveled, with age.

NCIS, which averaged 11.8 million viewers its first season back in 2003-04, grew by more than a million viewers last year alone.

This contradicts TV’s natural order. NCIS (which starts its 11th season at 8 p.m. Tuesday on CBS) seems to have a long-term lease on TV’s fountain of youth.

It doesn’t hurt that NCIS keeps an absorbing, go-down-easy recipe of drama, character, and humor that no other show is able to match.

“There’s four of us who were there in the beginning, plus pretty much 90 percent of our crew,” says Harmon, citing the stability of the show’s production team as a key reason for its robustness.

Granted, there have been comings and goings. This summer, NCIS fans were shocked to learn that Cote de Pablo was exiting after eight seasons. The new season’s first two episodes give her character, Special Agent Ziva David, a dramatic send-off.

“We wish Cote well,” says Harmon. “But for those of us still here, it’s all about moving on: ‘This is what we’ve got, and we’re going to find a way to make it even better.’

“I’m not trying to shuck off our success, because it’s all earned, every bit of it. By a lot of people.”

Harmon reaffirms his one-for-all-and-all-for-one manifesto.

“I’m not the big dog,” he says flatly. “I might be a dog. But there’s a lot of dogs.”

Now 62, Harmon is an unlikely TV superstar. His manner is friendly but crisp, soft-spoken, and firmly self-effacing. With his pretty-boy looks matured in middle age, this is the all-grown-up version of the star quarterback at UCLA who, after brief turns in law school, advertising, and selling shoes, set his sights anew on acting and made good.

He forged a solid career in a succession of TV series, including Reasonable Doubts, Chicago Hope, and St. Elsewhere, where, nearly 30 years ago, he played the first prime-time hero to die of AIDS.

His films include The Presidio, Natural Born Killers, and Freaky Friday.

Still, the man crowned as “the greatest actor who ever lived” by Family Guy cartoon aesthete Peter Griffin never reached the top tier of show-biz, even as he weathered accolades like People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1986. As with most actors, he has suffered setbacks, such as his ABC private-eye drama Charlie Grace, which lasted little more than a month in 1995.

So when NCIS arrived as a spinoff of the durable but non-flashy military drama JAG, there was no particular reason to expect fireworks from this new venture.

“We were able to keep it afloat a couple of years because we weren’t good enough to get all the attention, and we weren’t bad enough to get canceled,” says Harmon with a laugh. “And the biggest thing: We shoot in Santa Clarita,” which sits 30 miles comfortably removed from Los Angeles. “Nobody from the network wanted to drive out there!”

NCIS still shoots at Santa Clarita Studios, which means a lengthy commute for Harmon and many of his cast mates.

That’s fine with him. Ten years and running on NCIS isn’t about to drive him somewhere else.

“I’ve been acting long enough to appreciate the kind of opportunity this show is,” he says. “It’s a machine, but it’s a machine that’s forever changing, and if we’re able to maintain what we have here, I don’t see any reason why it can’t continue for a while.”

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